Description

This is fine route with lots of slab climbing, jamming and liebacking. Guidebooks vary on exact route and difficulty -- 9 or 9 minus. This felt soft for a South Platte 9. It's a good route for someone breaking into the grade. The rock is classic S. Platte granite: hard and knobby.

Pitch One: Lieback and jam an obvious 5.7 dihedral or follow a crack system angling up and left in the middle of a face. Find a belay in a spacious pod at the base of a huge right-facing dihedral.

Pitch Two: Ascend easy ground up and right to a belay ledge about 100 feet up.

Pitch Three: Climb the clean, right-facing, right-leaning dihedral. The crux is a traverse to cracks at the end of the dihedral.

Pitch Four: Either take the sweet finger crack splitting the face on climber's left(as depicted in Peter Hubbel's South Platte The Rock Climber's Guide) or climb the wide chimney on climber's right (Ken Trout's South Platte Rock). The finger crack protects easily. The wide crack would take a No. 4 Big Bro if you have one but only where the crack narrows a bit and the climbing gets easier. Either way, climb to a cave under a large overhang.

Pitch Five: We traversed out right(east)and made a couple slab moves with ledge-fall potential before you can place gear. Continue up obvious cracks to easy ground and on to the summit.

Location

The start of this route is hard to find. Traverse along the base of Wigwam far to the east of Hill Route and Ramblin Rose. Fight through brush and boulders about 40 feet up to a clearing on a wide ledge and walk back left until you see an obvious right-facing dihedral with a hand size crack leading to a bushy corner. There is probably a better way but that's how we got there.

We took the wide crack on pitch 4. You can get a orange TCU in a pod just as the chimney starts to shrink that will protect you through the crux. The finger crack looked excellent and more exposed, but the chimney was super fun and classic in my opinion. Great climb.

It's good to note that, personally, I believe the lower you traverse on pitch 3 the easier it is. However, you better be comfortable with a 40ft traverse on 5.7/5.8 slab. It seems the higher up the dihedral you wait, the more water-worn the slab gets. My 2-cents. Great climb!

Climbed it again yesterday, 9/21, and did the finger crack variation on pitch 4. Stellar. With having done both options, the finger crack variation is definitely the way to go, in my opinion. Used just a #1 and 0.75 in the finger crack and that's it for the pitch. It does eat up gear though. Do it!

Just climbed this route today. There was some icefall and some water on the climb, but it will still fun and climbable. Nobody talks much about the descent, and the little that is mentioned says to go southwest (climber's left at top of route) to rap and walk off. There isn't much to rap off except some trees, and it takes longer to get back to the base of the climb that way. If you go east (climber's right), there is an easy, all walk off descent down a gully to the right of Wigwam Dome.

This is a pretty good route. My girlfriend and I climbed this route yesterday in pretty windy conditions - up to 40mph gusts. Approach took 1h15m at a casual pace and was pretty easy to follow the "trail."

All in all, the climbing is pretty easy with short cruxes thrown in to make it exciting. We both agreed the climbing was no harder than 5.8+. The "finger crack" variation on P4 is really just a couple moves of Lumpy Ridge-esque "crack climbing." I think I locked one time towards the top of the crack. From there, an easy corner leads to an obvious belay ledge. Small cams on P3's crux are helpful. The belay at the Top of P3 (inside the chimney, below the finger crack variation) is tricky. Don't place gear in the seemingly stable flake... it's definitely hollow. Place large nuts/smaller cams higher up instead.

Walk off to the east/northeast and down the gully is really straightforward. The only possible way to get thrown off is if you walk too low and miss the start of the route. Just hug the edge of the dome and you'll get back to your packs in 30-40m.

A single rack of gear seems reasonable for this route. Doubles in 0.5-#1 Camalot would be ideal.

A couple of notes: 1) The route, as described above, is a bit different than what is listed in the Hubbel guide (take a look at the photo with the red line to see where Hubbel shows the route going). I suspect the Hubbel variation bumps up the grade when you traverse left after the finger crack, rather than going straight up the wide flake above. 2) Don't cheat yourself of some of the best climbing on the route by traversing far right on the third pitch. Continuing up the dihedral may be harder, but the low traverse indicated by the blue line in the beta photo is mediocre, run-out and 5.5 at the most. 3) A single rack up to #3 with doubles in the 0.5-1.0 range is perfect for this route. A #4 is definitely not necessary if you take the finger crack (not sure about the chimney variation.)

All in all, this was a nice moderate romp up an impressive dome, lacking only in sustained difficulty.